WARNING!
This is an older article that may not reflect Dr. Mercola’s current view on this topic. Use our search engine to find Dr. Mercola’s latest position on any health topic.
By Dr. Mercola
In 2012, then California Assemblyman Dr. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento)1 assured Californians that a bill he sponsored (AB2107) to increase child vaccination rates in the state would not remove parental rights to make vaccine choices for their children.
Now a state Senator, he's singing a different tune. This year he worked with attorney Senator Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) to fast track a bill (SB277) through the state legislature
The bill would make it virtually impossible for California children to attend daycare or get a school education without receiving more than 40 doses of 10 federally recommended vaccines or filing a medical vaccine exemption granted by a medical doctor.
If the bill is made law, parents and their children will pay a hefty price. As Dr. Pan stated on his Facebook page2 on June 9:
"it is time for all state legislatures to step in... Yes, parents have the right to refuse vaccination for their children, but to protect other parents' and children's rights, these families must then accept the consequences of their decision: no admittance to public preschool, school, college, or workplace. [Emphasis mine]
That's right; unless you vaccinate your child, he or she will be denied a school education from preschool through college. You'll have no option but to homeschool.
And, it sounds like Dr. Pan is not going to be content with preventing children from getting an education but is also going to lobby to deny employment to adults unwilling to comply with federal vaccine recommendations.
How can this occur in America, "land of the free"? It is with a shudder I realize that my satirical April Fool's article, "US Government Rolls Out Mandatory Adult Vaccination and Tracking Program", is becoming more frighteningly real with each passing day.
Many of my readers were outraged after reading that satire piece. They didn't realize it was a joke until they read my disclaimer at the end of the article because it hit so close to the truth.
That really says something about the growing discomfort with and deteriorating faith in oppressive and ineffective public health policies and laws.
Threat of Forced Vaccinations May Unleash a New Wave of Activism
If SB277 passes, I believe California will experience a traumatic backlash, as parents will have no recourse but to shrug and comply, or flee like refugees to states where some semblance of medical choice and parental rights still exist.
As noted by co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) Barbara Loe Fisher during her recent Sacramento rally speech opposing SB277:
"The right of the State to tell us what to do to our bodies and the bodies of our children ends where our right to protect our lives and our children's lives begins.
No liability-free doctor inside or outside of government should be given the power to punish us if we choose not to play vaccine roulette with liability-free vaccines.
We believe every life is important. We will not look the other way while those of us vulnerable to vaccine injury and death are being sacrificed in the name of the greater good.
When the State considers one of us to be expendable, then we are all considered expendable.
We will not give up our human rights for our civil rights. We will not give up the human right to informed consent to medical risk taking in order to exercise our civil right to an education and medical care and employment..."
One Step Closer to Medical Tyranny: California Assembly Health Committee Votes to Eliminate Personal Belief Exemptions for Vaccinations
It's important to realize that getting a medical exemption is virtually impossible and is denied by doctors to 99.99 percent of children under federal guidelines, which is why personal belief (religious and conscientious) vaccine exemptions are so important. Barbara Loe Fisher discussed this in a recent article.
Even if your child is immune compromised or has suffered a previous vaccine reaction, which greatly heightens his or her risk of serious vaccine damage, your child may still be ineligible for a medical exemption—that's how narrow it is.
On June 9, the Assembly Health Committee in California held a five-hour long hearing on SB277. Barbara Loe Fisher gave five-minute testimony starting at just over 60 minutes into the meeting.
She also handled Q&A from the Committee along with Dr. Jay Gordon, and George Fatheree, an education law attorney who has a vaccine injured child. It is long, but I urge you to listen to this hearing.
It will enlighten you about how legislators making decisions for you and your family think and act when being lobbied by pharmaceutical companies, medical trade groups, and government health agencies determined to eliminate all informed consent protections in US vaccine laws.
Not only was the opposition treated with hostility, the Committee Chair ended the hearing with hundreds of parents and their children still waiting in halls and overflow rooms to testify, many of whom had traveled many hours to get there.
In the end, the Committee voted 12-6 in favor of passing the bill to the Assembly. Votes were split down party lines, with all Democrat committee members voting yes and all Republican members voting no. One Democrat abstained from voting as she uses a modified vaccine schedule for her child and files a personal belief exemption (PBE) to get her child into school.
The Unbelievable Is Happening...
It's really unbelievable that a discriminatory and unnecessary bill such as this is being permitted to move forward. It leaves people no choice but to flee or fight, creating anxiety, anger and citizen-led grassroots resistance that public health officials worry about so much.
If signed into law, I believe this draconian bill will backfire and turn citizens against government health officials and pediatricians implementing a one-size-fits-all vaccine policy that does not respect biological differences between individuals or honor civil and human rights. When the state uses force rather than reason, stronger resistance is created and I do not foresee this ending well.
How did we even get to this point? Recent history shows that this extreme legislation stemmed from misinformation and propaganda propagated by Pharma- funded special interest groups and media.
What started this mess was the hype over measles cases reported at Disneyland in early 2015. It is important to understand that NO ONE has died in the US from measles in the last 10 years, but the federal vaccine adverse events reporting system (VAERS) includes 98 reports of deaths associated with measles containing vaccines (MMR or MMRV) in that time period.3
It's also worth noting that although the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 requires doctors and other vaccine providers to report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths and serious health problems following vaccination to VAERS, it's estimated that less than 10 percent, perhaps less than one percent of all vaccine-related health problems are ever reported to VAERS.4
Senator Pan wants to use a forced pharmaceutical model—ostensibly to save lives, but if this was truly the priority, he would be targeting a true deadly epidemic that is occurring right now. There are several to choose from, including prescription drug overdoses,5 which is the result of an overreliance on the very drug model he's pushing. In 2013, nearly two million Americans abused prescription painkillers and nearly 23,000 Americans died from prescription drug overdoses. Each day, almost 7,000 people are treated in emergency departments for using these drugs in a manner other than as directed.6
When you take a cold hard look at what's actually killing people, both children and adults, it seems quite clear that all this talk of saving lives is used for effect and little else. If the intention was truly to save children's lives, wouldn't you start with the issues causing the most deaths? If you are going to remove people's right to education, with the threat to also remove employment options unless you accept forced medication, shouldn't your argument for doing so begin with body counts and damages?
Were that the case, a clear priority would be to prevent drug overdoses. That is the leading cause of deaths of those under 18 yrs old. Measles deaths are zero. It seems this is a case of supporting the drug industry; not protecting children.
Yet the 134 Disneyland-related measles cases reported in California in 2015 were used to further the pharmaceutical industry's vaccine marketing goals. What most people don't know is that 55 percent of the Disneyland measles cases were in adults and only 18 percent were in school aged children and 30 percent of the cases with vaccine records HAD been vaccinated!7,8
Remember, no one is liable in a civil court of law if your child is harmed or killed by a government recommended and mandated vaccine—not the doctor shaming and threatening you into getting it, nor the drug company selling it, or the public health official licensing, recommending and mandating it.
This insulation from product and vaccine injury liability makes it all the more important for people to have the freedom to make an informed, voluntary vaccine decision, but the freedom to make medical care choices for yourself and your children is quickly eroding—a pattern I've warned about for a number of years now.
Drug Companies have Donated Millions to California Lawmakers
Considering the radical and anti-democratic nature of this proposed legislation, it should come as no surprise that money appears to have played a role. The Sacramento Bee9 recently revealed drug makers donated $2 million to current members of the California Legislature in 2013-2014. The article also lists the dollar amounts received by each individual member. According to Sac Bee:
"Nine of the top 20 recipients are either legislative leaders or serve on either the Assembly or Senate health committees. Receiving more than $95,000, the top recipient of industry campaign cash is Sen. Richard Pan, a Sacramento Democrat and doctor who is carrying the vaccine bill.
In addition, the industry donated more than $500,000 to outside campaign spending groups that helped elect some current members last year. Leading pharmaceutical companies also spent nearly $3 million more during the 2013-2014 legislative session lobbying the Legislature, the governor, the state pharmacists' board and other agencies, according to state filings." [Emphasis mine]
Policy Change at the American Medical Association: Eliminate Non-Medical Exemptions
The American Medical Association (AMA) recently voted to approve medical policy changes to support the elimination of personal and religious belief exemptions from vaccination laws. As noted by California Healthline:10 "Under the new policy, which was adopted at the AMA's annual meeting, the physician group will support exemptions from vaccinations only in medically necessary cases."
While the AMA is a medical trade group and not a government legislative body and, therefore, cannot make law, it has issued recommendations to state health departments and physicians everywhere to root out non-medical exemptions, and is using its political clout to persuade legislators to remove religious and personal belief vaccine exemptions from public health laws nationwide.
Does the medical system always know what's best for everyone? The facts speak for themselves, I think. The medical system has recklessly overused antibiotics, which has contributed to the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections that now kills over 60 people EVERY DAY in the US alone, and medical errors have become the third leading cause of hospital-related death in the US, causing more than 400,000 preventable deaths annually. I'd say the medical system is rather prone to getting it wrong.
Glaring Omissions from Forced Vaccination Discussion
Unfortunately, most California legislators show no forward thinking when it comes to acknowledging vaccine risks and failures or the urgent need to protect vaccine choice. There's no admission that whooping cough (pertussis) has become resistant to the vaccine, or that vaccinated individuals become carriers capable of spreading whooping cough to others,11,12 including to both vaccinated and unvaccinated children and adults.
Despite that, an accusatory finger is always pointed at the unvaccinated when a pertussis outbreak occurs. There's also no admission that a high number of whooping cough cases are actually occurring in vaccinated individuals and that, for example, 90 percent of the pediatric pertussis cases with vaccine records reported in California in 2014 had been vaccinated.13
In March 2015, KSBW in reported that four students at Monterey Park School in Salinas, CA were diagnosed with whooping cough despite the fact that 99.5 percent of the students at Monterey Park were vaccinated, including the four students who contracted the disease.14
Health officials have also expressed concern over the fact that most of the older children contracting whooping cough in the county of Los Angeles have received five pertussis containing vaccines (DTaP and Tdap) between the ages of two months and seven years—FIVE doses! How many booster shots are really reasonable to avoid one disease?
In the case of measles, there's no admission that over half the Disneyland measles infections occurred in adults. This bill will have no effect on preventing measles at Disneyland or in schools, stores, airports and buses or in other public gathering places.
There's no mention of the sketchy history of Merck, the measles vaccine manufacturer, in creating hit lists to "discredit" and "neutralize" dissenting doctors criticizing the safety of its products like Vioxx,15 much like this bill targets informed citizens with punishment for criticizing the safety of its MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and refusing to use it.
Nor is anyone addressing the fact that Merck's own scientists have accused the company of faking efficacy tests for its mumps vaccine16 and the inconvenient fact that mumps outbreaks are occurring among MMR vaccinated populations.17,18,19 During the mumps "epidemic" in the Netherlands, which occurred from September 1, 2009 through August 31, 2012, nearly 68 percent of those affected had received two doses of MMR vaccine.
In the 2010 mumps outbreak in New York, the source was a fully vaccinated boy who had recently returned from the UK, where a mumps outbreak had spread to 4,000 people.
Food for Thought: When Forced Vaccinations Don't Prevent Disease Outbreaks, What Then?
It makes me wonder, once vaccination rates reach 99.99 percent or more (and nationally we're already at 95 percent coverage for six childhood vaccines - diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella)20 and there are no unvaccinated people left to blame, what measures will our government resort to then to 'eliminate' outbreaks? And what about the research21 showing that obesity weakens immune response to vaccines?
Now we're back in April Fool's territory, but if they're really serious about having a successful vaccination campaign, they're going to have to do something about obesity... Might they opt for regulating food portions while having you weigh in daily?
How far could it go? Forced vaccination (if you want an education, medical care and employment that is) is already FAR beyond what most Americans would have imagined possible in this day and age of America. So chances are, they'll dictate as much of our lives as we let them...
The AMA is even considering testing older physicians to assess their physical and mental health and their treatment of patients. There's no mandatory retirement age among doctors, who can continue practicing well into advanced age if they so choose, and this, the AMA says, might put patients at risk. But, as astutely pointed out by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS):22 "Testing would give a pretext for sidelining doctors who follow the old-time ethics of putting patients first, not the population or herd, and who do not slavishly follow bureaucratically established protocols."
If by now you expect a satire disclaimer at the end of this article, you will be sorely disappointed, because this is all true. The slippery slope toward medical tyranny and elimination of all dissenters—be they within or outside of the medical system—has sharply inclined in California, a state that is positioned to join Mississippi and West Virginia if SB277 is made law, as one of only three states to deny parents the right to make vaccine risk choices in caring for their children.
And, they do so knowing that there is no civil liability for the harm that WILL occur when children at high risk for vaccine damage are forced to get vaccinated when their parents don't have the financial or educational resources to homeschool and can't find a doctor to write a medical vaccine exemption.
SB277 Is Just the Beginning...
What's worse, Dr. Pan has made public comments that this kind of tyranny is only the beginning. He apparently plans to lobby for laws eliminating vaccine choice for adults in California so they cannot be employed unless they get all federally recommended vaccines, which is the kind of oppression my April Fool's article predicted. If Dr. Pan has his way, those not fully vaccinated per the pharmaceutical model will basically be segregated and unemployed, which will impoverish many citizens and their families and make it impossible for them to function in society.
If this type of discriminatory legislation that violates civil, human and parental rights spreads to other states, perhaps Americans will have to start filing for "medical refugee" status in other countries. And mind you, this is not another April Fool's article; I'm being quite serious now. How far might this kind of medical tyranny go?
Time is the ultimate variable. The same short-term thinking that created antibiotic resistance is creating the situation where overuse of vaccines are pushing childhood diseases into adulthood and also contributing to the epidemic of chronic disease and disability that we see among so many children today. There are also multi-generational consequences to vaccinating when you consider the effects of epigenetics, the emerging field of science that has revealed our health is as much influenced by the environment and lives of our ancestors, as it is influenced by our inherited DNA and our life choices.
When doctors administer combinations of vaccines simultaneously and repeatedly so close together, it becomes very difficult to trace adverse effects on immune and brain function —especially if serious health problems develop years later, let alone a generation later. It's interesting to note that veterinarians know not to vaccinate nursing animals, but the medical system doesn't even consider this variable when vaccinating newborn infants – or pregnant mothers for that matter.
As noted in one recent study:23
"Early in life, immune protection is accomplished by maternal antibodies transferred from mother to offspring. However, decaying maternal antibodies inhibit vaccination as is exemplified by the inhibition of seroconversion after measles vaccination. This phenomenon has been described in both human and veterinary medicine and is independent of the type of vaccine being used... In lieu of immunizing the infant, the concept of maternal immunization as a strategy to protect neonates has been proposed. This approach would still not solve the question of how to immunize in the presence of maternal antibodies but would defer the time of infection to an age where infection might not have such a detrimental outcome as in neonates."
Many veterinarians also measure blood antibody titers for dogs before revaccinating them,24 but pediatricians do not measure antibody titers for our children before routinely giving them more booster shots. Why is that? It's just a simple blood test, and it can tell parents whether a booster shot is completely unnecessary, which could serve to radically reduce the risk of vaccine injury and death for children.
Signs of Backlash Already Emerging
A Washington Times25 article suggests the backlash in California against government overreach is already starting to show:
"The state capitol has been flooded off and on for months with parental-choice advocates drawing thousands for protests against Senate Bill 277, which would eliminate personal belief or religious exemptions and require all children without a medical exemption to be vaccinated before entering public school. And the outcry has only grown louder as the bill nears passage, spreading beyond the issue of vaccination safety and morphing into a full-blown revolt against government intrusion into civil liberties." [Emphasis mine]
Despite the public outcry with thousands of mothers and fathers in California showing up in person with their children to testify against the bill in committee hearings and protest at rallies, Senator Pan insists that "most Californians" support the bill, and that a Public Policy Institute of California poll shows two-thirds of respondents support the requirement that children must be fully vaccinated to enter school. Dr. Pan told the Assembly committee: "This majority will not be silent. When more people are hospitalized or die of preventable contagious diseases, they will hold us accountable for denying the science of vaccinations if we refuse to act."
This is the kind of disinformation and backward thinking that will get our country into really deep water. Federally recommended vaccines are made available for free to all those who choose to use them in America.26,27 Vaccines are not being withheld from any parent who wants to give them to their children.
How Can We Trust Health Authorities That Have No Liability for the Outcome?
Suffering complications from an infectious disease is tragic and so is suffering complications from vaccination. Every life is important. Those who are injured or die from government recommended and mandated vaccinations should not be treated as collateral damage in a war on childhood infections that the vast majority of children with normal, healthy immune function experience without complications - and gain lifelong immunity from to boot.
Despite what public health officials would have you believe, vaccines carry very real and serious risks. For some people, vaccine risks are more likely to cause brain and immune damage or death than the disease being vaccinated against. The evidence that vaccines cause harm is indisputable and Congress knew it when the shielded vaccine makers and doctors from vaccine injury lawsuits in 1986. Consider this: more than $3 billion has been paid out by the government since 1988 to children and adults for whom the risks of vaccination turned out to be 100 percent.28
Yet, while public health officials routinely emphasize infectious disease risks, they downplay vaccine risks and urge mainstream media to do the same. For example, vaccine-related deaths rarely get much media attention. However, in the last several weeks, I've come across two alternative media stories about infants dying only days after receiving a cocktail of vaccines. One four-month old baby girl died after receiving seven vaccines at the same time29 and a six-month old boy died after receiving 13 vaccines all at once.30
"I felt like it was my fault," Quavia Turner says in her heartbreaking account.31 "After her reactions at two months old, I didn't want her to get anymore vaccines, period. I felt bullied into it. I questioned the shots because of her previous reactions to them and they were like, "nothing will happen."...I thought I was doing the right thing. Where we live in Tennessee, if you don't vaccinate, they try to deem you unfit. You are made to feel you have no choice what vaccines your child gets and when they get them...I truly felt horrible, I felt I went against my better judgment and trusted the doctors over my instincts as a mother."
How are people supposed to trust doctors who have zero liability for their recommendations? As noted by Barbara Loe Fisher in her testimony opposing SB277 in the California Assembly Health Committee hearing:
"This bill is not about measles or pertussis. It is about taking power away from mothers and fathers to make medical risk decisions for their minor children and handing it over to doctors to implement a one-size-fits-all policy with no personal accountability for the children who become casualties of that policy. It punishes parents with good reason to conclude their children are already vaccine injured or vulnerable to vaccine harm but cannot find a doctor to acknowledge that and write a medical vaccine exemption."
Show Us the Research!
It's important to realize that not one single large prospective, case controlled study has ever compared health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. The argument used to defend this indefensible fact is that it would be medically negligent to deny vaccines to children participating in the "unvaccinated" control arm of such a study. However, as noted by Dr. Dean Blumberg, a pediatrician testifying on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the California Medical Association, parents who exempt their children from vaccinations tend to cluster together, and in some California schools the opt-out rate is as high as 50 percent.
Here's a ready-made study population of parents who do and do not give their children government recommended vaccines, split right down the middle. At the very least a prospective observational study comparing the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children could be conducted to evaluate whether there is a difference between the two groups of children diagnosed with learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, developmental delays, asthma, diabetes and other brain and immune disorders. There is really no valid argument for why such comparative studies remain "unfeasible."
Completely unsupported arguments for vaccination continue to be made, but in reality, no one actually knows how decades of aggressive implementation of one-size-fits all vaccine policies in America have impacted "the greater good." The idea that vaccines are a beneficial public health measure may be a complete fallacy, but we cannot know for sure without methodologically sound comparative studies of vaccinated and unvaccinated children and adults.
In the meantime, it would behoove every single American to consider the ramifications of forced vaccinations given the large gaps in vaccine safety science.32 It is shocking that there is so little sound evidence published in the medical literature to support federal recommendations that all children should get 69 doses of 16 vaccines starting on day of birth through age 18.33
Consider this simple question: Do you want the legal right to reject vaccines that carry a risk of brain inflammation, brain damage and death? How about the right to decline HPV vaccine that can cause a chronic autoimmune disorder or a flu shot that can cause Guillan-Barre syndrome and narcolepsy? In order to be able to make informed vaccine choices and not be punished for the choices we make, we cannot have bills like SB277 on the books.
Act Now to Protect Bodily Integrity and Freedom of Choice
If you want the legal right to protect your bodily integrity or that of your child when it comes to vaccine risk-taking, if you do not want to wake up one day and be forced to play vaccine roulette when you have good reason to conclude that you or your child are at high risk for suffering vaccine harm, you need to act now.
The Assembly Health Committee voted to pass SB277 and if the full Assembly votes to approve it, the bill will go to Governor Browns desk for his signature. The bill is being fast-tracked, so quick action by Californians' is essential if there is any chance of stopping it from becoming law.
Californians - participate in our democracy and ACT NOW to protect your parental and vaccine informed consent rights. There is no substitute for one-on-one personal contact with your own Assembly member and Governor. Find the name and contact info for your Assembly member here. Track SB277 and immediately contact your Assembly member and Governor Brown on your cell phone, tablet or computer by using the free online NVIC Advocacy Portal.
![Click Here to Contact Your Assembly Member]()
If SB277 becomes law in California, your only options as a parent will be to (1) find a doctor to write an almost impossible to get medical vaccine exemption for your child or (2) homeschool or enroll your child in an independent study program. Under federal guidelines, 99.99 percent of all children do not qualify for a medical exemption.